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| Green Party mayoral candidate Sian Berry: growing a sustainable London | Green Party mayoral candidate Sian Berry: growing a sustainable London |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| London’s Green Party picked the humble community hall of the West Kensington housing estate as the location for announcing that Camden councillor Sian Berry will be their mayoral candidate for 2106. It was the perfect setting for them. The “West Ken” and its neighbour Gibbs Green face demolition as part of the wider Earls Court Project, a huge redevelopment scheme that comprehensively exemplifies the worst approaches to “regeneration” in the capital. The Greens are right to strongly oppose it. | |
| Yet this very opposition focuses a large question for Green politics in London as a whole. The city’s economy is strengthening, its population is booming. It needs more jobs, more transport capacity and more homes. It needs to grow. If what’s happening in Earls Court is the wrong way for London to meet those needs, what does Berry’s party think is the right way? Are Greens keen on the concept of economic growth at all, and, if so, what would the Green variety be like if Berry took command of City Hall? | |
| The near-certainty, of course, is that she won’t. A good result for Berry next May would be finishing third behind the likely Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith and whoever gets the job for Labour. This would emulate the major 2012 achievement of Jenny Jones in edging ahead of the Lib Dems and further cement the valuable Green presence in London politics. | The near-certainty, of course, is that she won’t. A good result for Berry next May would be finishing third behind the likely Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith and whoever gets the job for Labour. This would emulate the major 2012 achievement of Jenny Jones in edging ahead of the Lib Dems and further cement the valuable Green presence in London politics. |
| Just as importantly, Berry is also a very good bet to succeed the outgoing Jones as a London Assembly member (AM), having topped her party’s ballot for candidates to seek election to the assembly by the proportional representation route. If Islington councillor Caroline Russell, second on the list, doesn’t join her and thereby maintain the current Green assembly group of two, it will be a large setback. A third AM, who would be Lambeth’s Jonathan Bartley, would represent a big success. | Just as importantly, Berry is also a very good bet to succeed the outgoing Jones as a London Assembly member (AM), having topped her party’s ballot for candidates to seek election to the assembly by the proportional representation route. If Islington councillor Caroline Russell, second on the list, doesn’t join her and thereby maintain the current Green assembly group of two, it will be a large setback. A third AM, who would be Lambeth’s Jonathan Bartley, would represent a big success. |
| Berry’s pitch is that this is an exciting time for politics in London, by which she mostly means the politics of grassroots displeasure, especially over housing costs and the city’s big money land and property development. Greens have embraced other anti-demolition campaigns and are often prominent in attempts to resist gentrification. Like her party’s national leader Natalie Bennett, Berry regards the triumphs of Scottish Nationalists and the enthusiasm sparked by Jeremy Corbyn as evidence that “political space is opening up” for Greens as well, with their youthful profile, anti-austerity stance and antipathy to big business dominance. She wants to harness this energy to expand local level activism, building power in communities and “giving London back to Londoners”. | |
| Green Party membership has surged to 12,000 in the capital. Berry has promised an imaginative campaign. How, though, will it go beyond backing neighbourhood protests to enthusing a wider electorate with a vision of how a Green London could evolve? Berry’s attitude to housing provides important clues. She correctly pointed out that putting residents in control of estate regenerations - which is what the West Kensington and Gibbs Green campaigners want - needn’t mean less low cost housing, and has promised a manifesto with ideas for making good and better use of brownfield sites, close to transport links. | |
| She was realistic about the fact that, like it or not, about a third of London’s “affordable” homes (along with other community benefits, such as new schools) are being supplied as by-products of commercial developments and that the current dearth of public money means London cannot afford to just turn that delivery tap off. Berry would, she says, challenge those arcane “viability” assessments developers use to minimise their contributions: “We can get more out of these deals.” In that, she sounds no different from Labour’s mayoral hopefuls. More distinctive is her view that “resident-developed master plans and ideas is the way to make these things more acceptable.” | She was realistic about the fact that, like it or not, about a third of London’s “affordable” homes (along with other community benefits, such as new schools) are being supplied as by-products of commercial developments and that the current dearth of public money means London cannot afford to just turn that delivery tap off. Berry would, she says, challenge those arcane “viability” assessments developers use to minimise their contributions: “We can get more out of these deals.” In that, she sounds no different from Labour’s mayoral hopefuls. More distinctive is her view that “resident-developed master plans and ideas is the way to make these things more acceptable.” |
| Berry also said her party is eager to formulate a plan for rent controls, but as the London Assembly’s housing committee has lately heard, even if London mayors had the power to impose these - and at present they don’t - they can too easily have counter-productive effects, including primarily helping the more fortunate private housing tenants while restricting the expansion and improvement of the sector, something London badly needs. | Berry also said her party is eager to formulate a plan for rent controls, but as the London Assembly’s housing committee has lately heard, even if London mayors had the power to impose these - and at present they don’t - they can too easily have counter-productive effects, including primarily helping the more fortunate private housing tenants while restricting the expansion and improvement of the sector, something London badly needs. |
| The rent control (or regulation) issue demonstrates one of a range of tensions between desirable continuity and progressive change that every party’s housing policy must address. If the Greens are to persuade voters that they are more than a protest party, they will have to find a Green way to reconcile those objectives. There’s also an obvious conflict between, on the one hand, Green scepticism about rampant, resource-eating capitalism and, on the other, the need for London to maintain its economic vigour and its transport, housing and land development to keep pace with its population boom. Persuading national governments, especially the present one, that the capital deserves the big lumps of public cash it depends on to meet these goals means persuading them that such investment will nurture business activity and private profit in a powerhouse London economy on which the whole nation depends. That’s not what Greens are about, is it? | |
| “Well, economic growth is not really the point when you’re talking about a prosperous city,” Berry objected. “The current system isn’t working. People with normal jobs, on normal wages can’t afford to live in the city and are having to live miles away and facing high transport costs. Money’s going to waste because of that kind of inefficiency. We can run London in a more efficient way, that’s also fairer and greener for people. All of those things come together. There would be something to be presented to George Osborne at the end of that, which said, ‘we’re not wasting money.’ We want to see more people come to London and more jobs for people, and higher wages, and that’s economic growth. What we don’t want to see is more resources used.” | “Well, economic growth is not really the point when you’re talking about a prosperous city,” Berry objected. “The current system isn’t working. People with normal jobs, on normal wages can’t afford to live in the city and are having to live miles away and facing high transport costs. Money’s going to waste because of that kind of inefficiency. We can run London in a more efficient way, that’s also fairer and greener for people. All of those things come together. There would be something to be presented to George Osborne at the end of that, which said, ‘we’re not wasting money.’ We want to see more people come to London and more jobs for people, and higher wages, and that’s economic growth. What we don’t want to see is more resources used.” |
| OK. But is there not a serious contradiction between the conservationist strand of Green thinking and London’s need for more building, more economic activity and so on? Isn’t that a particularly hard circle for Greens to square? | |
| “Yes, and on a global scale, economic growth does ultimately lead to a depletion in the quality of the Earth and resources and so on, but on a city level, seeing waste and inefficiency and clearing the two things up together can work. We could build a much more self-sufficient city, where we use resources better, we grow more food, we recycle, we compost. All of those things can add up to a much more sustainable city, with more people in it. It’s the things that make it unsustainable, the fleets of HGVs that bring all our food in every day, the waste of shipping things in and out of London when we could be repairing them.” | “Yes, and on a global scale, economic growth does ultimately lead to a depletion in the quality of the Earth and resources and so on, but on a city level, seeing waste and inefficiency and clearing the two things up together can work. We could build a much more self-sufficient city, where we use resources better, we grow more food, we recycle, we compost. All of those things can add up to a much more sustainable city, with more people in it. It’s the things that make it unsustainable, the fleets of HGVs that bring all our food in every day, the waste of shipping things in and out of London when we could be repairing them.” |
| Isn’t that a bit austere, albeit in a verdant kind of way? | Isn’t that a bit austere, albeit in a verdant kind of way? |
| “That’s not austere, getting something mended! That’s just common sense!” | “That’s not austere, getting something mended! That’s just common sense!” |
| We’ll learn more from the Berry manifesto and from the mayoral campaign itself. After the election, Green efficacy will be largely judged by its AMs’ ability to influence the next mayor. The party did constructive business with Ken Livingstone. Boris Johnson has been harder work. By contrast, they might find a Conservative Mayor Goldsmith, with his conservationist leanings and environmental concerns, especially on air quality, quite amenable in certain ways. | We’ll learn more from the Berry manifesto and from the mayoral campaign itself. After the election, Green efficacy will be largely judged by its AMs’ ability to influence the next mayor. The party did constructive business with Ken Livingstone. Boris Johnson has been harder work. By contrast, they might find a Conservative Mayor Goldsmith, with his conservationist leanings and environmental concerns, especially on air quality, quite amenable in certain ways. |
| He could be more to their liking than a Labour mayor in the form of Tessa Jowell, whose backer and likely senior policy adviser Andrew Adonis has warmly praised the Earls Court Project, progeny of the Tory free market fundamentalists who used to run Hammersmith and Fulham council. Sadiq Khan, generally thought Jowell’s closest rival in the Labour candidate race, might suit Greens better. He is against wholesale estate demolition and favours strong resident involvement in moves by boroughs to “densify” them by adding more homes to the same space. | He could be more to their liking than a Labour mayor in the form of Tessa Jowell, whose backer and likely senior policy adviser Andrew Adonis has warmly praised the Earls Court Project, progeny of the Tory free market fundamentalists who used to run Hammersmith and Fulham council. Sadiq Khan, generally thought Jowell’s closest rival in the Labour candidate race, might suit Greens better. He is against wholesale estate demolition and favours strong resident involvement in moves by boroughs to “densify” them by adding more homes to the same space. |
| All that is to come. For now, the Greens are full of hope. Berry was their mayoral candidate in 2008 and has gained much practical experience since then, as have the Greens as a whole. Soon, London will learn how much she and her idealistic party can continue to thrive in the big, bad Smoke. |
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